At Mad Rose Gallery, two exhibits invite a new way of seeing

Gallery director and artist Natalie Tyler
Natalia Zukerman


Gallery director and artist Natalie Tyler
Mad Rose Gallery in Millerton recently invited visitors to experience both of its current exhibits, “Ebb & Flow” and “The Female Gaze” with many of the artists in attendance.
The tour began with “Ebb & Flow,” an installation of glass works by Steven Weinberg, Lisa Sacco, Eric Hilton and Natalie Tyler. In the late-afternoon sun, the room became a kaleidoscope of bending, fracturing, flickering light. Color slid across the walls; reflections dissolved into shadow. It was a subtly instructive prelude to “The Female Gaze” next door as the glass didn’t just glow — it shifted the angle of attention, teaching the eye to notice differently.
The term “the female gaze” is attributed to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who, in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” named what Hollywood had long taken for granted: the camera — and by extension, the viewer — was aligned with a masculine subjectivity. Women existed on-screen largely as objects, not agents.
In the decades since, the “female gaze” has evolved into something more expansive. It signals authorship, yes, but also empathy, subjectivity, and the refusal to flatten lived experience into familiar tropes. It is not simply the opposite of the male gaze; it is another way of seeing altogether.
Mad Rose’s eight featured photographers explore this premise across mediums, histories and sensibilities using diverse approaches to challenge conventional narratives. The response has been so positive that the exhibit has been extended through Dec. 28.

The tour began with Ava Pellor, whose large black-and-white portraits of bodies in nature rely on trust. She explained that she photographs with a tripod or a Rolleiflex so she “never breaks the connection with the subject.” The goal isn’t voyeurism, she said, but agency.
“What really shocks me is when people say, ‘I’ve never been photographed by a woman before,’ and then they thank me for letting them be who they are,” she explained. “That’s why I photograph the nude, to almost desexualize the female body, or the human body in general.”
The work explores the symbiotic, inseparable relationship between bodies and the natural world. “To live symbolically is to remember we are not apart from nature, but a continuation of it,” said Pellor.
Across from Pellor hang glossy and colorful images by internationally renowned fashion and costume designer, Han Feng. Co-founder of Mad Rose Neal Rosenthal spoke of her work saying, “I find her work exceptionally expressive and beautiful.”

Next was Jan Meissner, a writer who discovered the camera could tell stories she couldn’t write. Her early-2000s street photographs were taken in Soho. “I’ve never staged a photograph in my life,” she said. Revisiting the images now was strange, she admitted, depictions of a city that no longer exists.“I don’t think I could make these photographs anymore. The terrain has changed and I have changed. It was a moment in time, and I thank Mad Rose for sending me back there.”
An abstract photographer and longtime human rights lawyer, Pamela Takiff brings a different kind of witnessing. Her work begins with overlooked textures — broken glass, peeling paint —then pares away context so the viewer’s imagination takes over.
A Guggenheim Fellow and recent Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Barbara Bosworth’s black-and-white images were made with her 8x10 camera. “I began looking for light in the darkness,” she wrote of the work, which circles family, land, and the thin veil between presence and memory.
Artist Beatrice PediconiNatalia Zukerman
Beatrice Pediconi’s work spans drawing, photography, painting and video, all organized around her investigations of water as medium. She describes the pieces on view, created between 2009 and 2016, as explorations of “the fragility of all life, highlighting its ephemeral condition.”
Barbara Woike, who spent 33 years as a news photo editor with the Associated Press, offered both history and perspective as she guided visitors through her nearly 50-year-old portraits. “All of these photographs were shot almost 50 years ago,” she said. All pre-digital, all grounded in the subject itself. “Back in the day, photography was more about realism. Even if an abstract picture was shot, it was still shot from something very real — a leaf, a pepper, a naked body twisted so that you’d pause and ask, ‘What is this?’ before realizing it was a body.”

Woike’s career, she explained, grew from that foundation. When digital photography arrived, she witnessed its shift firsthand but stayed true to the ethos of capturing the moment. “Even though photography went digital, there was no alteration of images. I could have been fired for moving a Coca-Cola can out of a picture.”
Her work, she emphasized, has always been about the subject, not the photographer. “The work was about subject matter, not about me. Back then, people still argued whether photography was art at all. Someone might look at these pictures,” she said, gesturing to Beatrice Pediconi’s abstractions across the gallery, “and ask, ‘Is it photography?’ It’s about light, and what light can put into an image.”
Many of Woike’s subjects are no longer alive. “Some I never followed, others I knew until the day they died. That’s the power of portraiture — it lets people stay alive.”
One image holds particular weight: a portrait of Katherine “Sissy” Wells, the first trans person Woike met. When Woike posted the photograph on Facebook to mark what would have been Wells’ 108th birthday, hundreds of people responded with memories. In capturing Wells, Woike did more than preserve a face — she reframed perception, reminding viewers that the story beneath the image, like light through glass, is what makes it real.
The tour ended with Rosenthal speaking about his partner and gallery co-founder, Kerry Madigan’s work. Madigan, who has been making photographs since the 1970s, is experiencing aphasia due to cognitive impairment. Her images, preserved memories, form what Rosenthal described as “a bit of a travelogue of our experiences together traveling all over the world.”
Guests were then invited upstairs for the Mad Rose Winter Salon, featuring the work of local artists at various stages of their careers. Once again, viewers were reminded that perspective is never fixed. It shifts depending on where you stand, what you know, and who is doing the seeing.
Christine Bates
Anti-Trump signs are visible through the smashed rear window of a Millerton couple's Subaru hatchback after an unknown vandal walked down their driveway and damaged the glass.
MILLERTON — A car displaying anti-Trump political messages was vandalized while parked in a Millerton couple’s driveway late Friday, Aug. 14.
The vehicle’s rear window featured a “No Kings” sign and an image of President Donald Trump referencing Iran and Jeffrey Epstein. The owners believe those displays may have prompted someone to smash the Subaru hatchback's rear window, although investigators have found no evidence confirming a political motive.
The residents, who asked not to be identified because they fear additional targeting, said the car was parked several car lengths from the street inside their Dutchess Avenue home in the Village of Millerton. They discovered the damage the following morning and reported it to the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office.
The residents have a long history of activism in the community, regularly participating in public protests of the Trump administration and advocating for residents to remove what they deem are offensive signs and imagery.
“People know we have protested antisemitic signs and Confederate flags in the village," one of them said. "Most Saturdays we join the demonstrations in front of the White Hart in Salisbury.”
Dutchess County Sheriff's Capt. John Watterson said the department hasn't seen evidence that the incident was politically motivated. There are currently no suspects in the investigation.
D.H. Callahan
Dennis James plays the glass armonica in Colonial costume.
In the early 1760s, Benjamin Franklin was one of the most popular people in the world. The writer, printer, inventor and electricity pioneer was known throughout the British Colonies in America, as well as in Europe, as a respected intellectual and diplomat. While we know him as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he spent almost a third of his life in Europe. Eight of those years were spent in France, working to secure support from the French military during the Revolutionary War. But before that, he spent 18 years in England as a diplomatic representative from the colonies.
It was during that time when Franklin first witnessed a musician play a series of glass bowls by wetting his fingers and drawing them across the bowls’ rims. The sound was haunting and otherworldly — like nothing he, nor anyone else, had ever heard before. But as Franklin was transfixed by the sound, he saw what many great innovators see when witnessing something new: inefficiencies. The musician was moving all over the place, working far too hard to make these angelic sounds. So Franklin went about fixing the problem.
In 1761, Franklin commissioned an English glass blower to make him 36 glass bowls of specific diameters and thickness. He then mounted them on a rotating, lathe-like structure, interstacking the smaller bowls inside the openings of the larger ones. Now, instead of reaching all around a table, the musician could play the bowls in a style closer to a piano, simply by moving his fingers. Franklin called his new invention the armonica, after the Italian word for harmony, “armonia,” and was known to play it for friends and visitors.
For somebody whose name is synonymous with money, his face famously gracing the $100 bill, Franklin wasn’t quite as capitalistically minded as one might expect. He declined to patent the invention, instead allowing other instrument fabricators to make their own without paying him fees. Possibly due to his altruism, the armonica caught on, with pieces written for it by such compositional legends as Mozart and Beethoven.
Now, the instrument is coming to Great Barrington as part of the Berkshire Opera Festival. For its 10th anniversary, the festival is presenting “Lucia di Lammermoor” by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. The opera, which will be performed in its original Italian, is one of the most prominent works in the “bel canto” style. The term “bel canto” translates to “beautiful voice,” but today, the style can be best summed up as a more dramatic style, allowing performers to match their vocal tones to subjects or moods. This essentially lets the singers act with their voices through song.
The opera is most commonly performed with a flute solo, but the Festival chose to enlist the armonica, as was originally called for by Donizetti. To play it, BOF is bringing in multi-instrumentalist Dennis James, who has already demonstrated his armonica skills to Berkshire audiences at the American premiere of George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” at Tanglewood in 2013.
“Lucia di Lammermoor” will run at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington on Saturday, Aug. 22; Tuesday, Aug. 25; and Friday, Aug. 28. For tickets and more information, visit berkshireoperafestival.org/

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Richard Feiner And Annette Stover
Jeremy Boviard, General Manager at the Moviehouse in Millerton.
There’s something special about sharing a story in a room full of other people.
— Jeremy Boviard
Spend a few minutes talking with Jeremy Boviard about movies and you’re likely to forget what time it is.
Ask about a favorite film and he’ll happily explain the first time he saw it, how it was made and why it matters. One story leads to another. His enthusiasm is infectious. For Boviard, movies are far more than entertainment – they’re one of the best ways people connect.
That passion has made him the perfect steward of The Moviehouse in Millerton, where, as general manager, he has helped transform the nonprofit theater into a vibrant community gathering place.
“I like bringing people together to share something,” he said. “People come here to enjoy themselves, to learn about the world and themselves, and we’re here to facilitate and enhance that experience as much as possible.”
His path to The Moviehouse, however, wasn’t one he could have imagined.
Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Boviard grew up immersed in musical theater and developed an early love of cinema. Some of his first memories involve movies. As a toddler, he insisted on watching “E.T.” before deciding the opening scenes were too scary. Today, it’s one of his all-time favorites. He also wore out a VHS recording of the television broadcast of “The Wizard of Oz,” commercials and all.
Cinema was a family affair. His mother, a preschool teacher, would even mail him Siskel and Ebert’s “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” movie reviews while he was away at summer camp, to keep him in the loop.
“I’ve always loved talking about movies,” he said.
After studying communications and media at Northeastern University, Boviard explored a variety of careers. Then, in 2016, his life took an unexpected turn.
He came to northwest Connecticut seeking treatment for alcoholism at Mountainside Treatment Center in Canaan, expecting to stay for only a month or two.
Instead, he found a new beginning.
Nearly a decade later, Boviard remains sober and speaks openly about the experience that changed his life.
“It’s a big part of my identity,” he said. “It’s more than not drinking or doing drugs; it’s about having integrity and being open to others.”
After completing treatment, he stayed in the area and joined the Mountainside staff, eventually becoming a client services lead during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work was demanding, requiring compassion, flexibility and resilience.
“It helped me become — not the best version of myself, because I’m not perfect — but I feel stable and happy with my life in ways that 10 years ago I did not,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a lifelong journey.”
That same outlook shapes the way he approaches his work today.
When friends learned The Moviehouse was looking for a general manager after reopening in 2021, they immediately thought of Boviard. Running an independent movie theater had long been one of his dream jobs.
“It felt like a perfect fit,” he said, “and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity that [Moviehouse Chair and Vice Chair] Chelsea Altman and David Maltby have given me.”
His days rarely look the same. He helps choose films, organizes special events, oversees fundraising and educational programs, manages staff schedules and payroll, orders supplies — and, if necessary, teaches new team members to change the soda fountain syrup, as he did in the middle of this interview: “There are plenty of moments where you’re doing a little bit of everything.”
He credits Assistant General Manager Tom Cloutier, Public Relations and Marketing Director Helen Seslowsky, and the rest of the team for creating a culture built on trust and teamwork.
“When I’m not here physically, I trust that the people who are here are handling everything well,” he said. “That’s a really good place to be.”

Under Boviard’s leadership, The Moviehouse has expanded well beyond first-run films. Trivia nights, filmmaker discussions, live performances, after-school filmmaking programs and community partnerships have become part of its identity.
His goal is to offer something streaming services can’t.
“There’s something special about sharing a story in a room full of other people,” he said.
In an age when so much entertainment is experienced alone, Boviard believes the real magic of the movies is not confined to the screen. It’s found in the shared experience of watching together, lights dimming and a community discovering, for a couple of hours, that great stories are better when they’re shared.
That commitment extends beyond the theater. As co-chair of the Millerton Business Alliance, Boviard helps organize community events, including free holiday movie screenings and Festival of Lights activities.
He says he still finds himself struck by the quiet beauty of the region he unexpectedly came to call home.
Asked what advice he would give his younger self, Boviard doesn’t talk about career success or favorite films.
Instead, he offered a lesson earned through experience.
“Life’s full of surprises, and things often won’t play out how you expect,” he said. “If you put your best foot forward, stay even-keeled and remain as realistically optimistic as possible, life will lead to some unexpectedly wonderful places.”
Natalia Zukerman
Presenters at the 2025 Berkshire Mushroom Festival.
“Mycelium is Earth’s natural Internet,” says mycologist Paul Stamets. He also calls fungi “the grand recyclers of the planet” and says, “Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.”
If that sounds like a pretty good argument for paying more attention to what’s happening under your feet, the Berkshire Mushroom Festival is hosting a weekend made for you.
On Aug. 22 and 23, Tam Integration, an online psychedelic community organization, and Lee, Massachusetts-based dispensary Sweetgrass Botanicals will bring together foragers, cultivators, scientists, artists, cooks and curious humans at Dewey Hall in Sheffield, Massachusetts, for a weekend devoted to the remarkable world of mushrooms.
Stamets’ books, including “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World,” have helped inspire a broader fascination with the fungal kingdom, from the role of mycelium in forest ecosystems to the potential of mushrooms in medicine and environmental restoration. Similarly, Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” introduced millions of readers to the history and revival of psychedelic research, including scientific investigations into psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in certain mushrooms. Pollan’s reporting has helped illuminate a field that had moved from the counterculture into laboratories and serious conversations about consciousness and mental health.
This spirit fits the Berkshire festival, whose theme this year is “the mycelial web of nature, creativity, science and magic.” Over the course of the weekend, visitors can explore mushrooms from nearly every conceivable angle: guided walks and species identification, cultivation, cooking, crafts, spore-print art and conversations about medicinal and psychedelic fungi.
Among the presenters is Berkshire native John Wheeler, founder of the Berkshire Mycological Society, who has been foraging for more than 30 years and has identified roughly 1,100 mushroom species. He’ll lead a Sunday foraging workshop and join a panel on foraging and identification with Luke Sarrantonio, founder of Mycophilic. Sarrantonio, who grew up in Rosendale, has built a career around fungal education, cultivation and community projects, including the Catskills’ annual “For the Love of Fungi” mushroom and arts festival.

The festival also goes deep into the increasingly visible world of psychedelic fungi. Daniel Shankin, founder of Tam Integration, is a psychedelic integration coach whose work focuses on helping people incorporate transformative psychedelic experiences into their lives.
“It’s so exciting to be able to bring in such wide-ranging talent,” said Shankin of the speakers and presenters at this year’s festival. “There are people that I’ve been friends with in this community for years that I haven’t gotten to work with in person because they live in Guatemala or the Netherlands or another part of the world, so this is so exciting.”
As the founder of an organization that works with the psychedelic portion of the fungi world, Shankin is also excited to bring the growing consciousness around this modality to more people and train more people to be guides. “Not everybody necessarily needs to do psychedelics,” said Shankin, “but I feel like everybody needs to be able to hold space for somebody who’s on psychedelics.”
Cassandra Purdy, founder of Sweetgrass Botanicals, has spent more than 30 years immersed in the world of plant medicine, shamanism and entheogens. Together with other presenters, they’ll explore psychedelic preparation and integration, spirituality, safety, ethics and the art of creating supportive spaces for psychedelic experiences.
And the weekend’s conversation about fungi extends well beyond psychedelics. Imani Turnbull-Brown, co-founder of the Entheogen Melanin Collective, brings a focus on ancestral healing, Black wellness and making the psychedelic conversation more accessible and inclusive. Other sessions explore soil and regeneration, functional and medicinal mushrooms, cultivation, mushroom-inspired art and the practical business of growing fungi.
“I think people are increasingly suspicious of Western medicine,” said Shankin. “They’re looking for ways to combat the effects of aging and pollution, the effects of toxins in their foods, and they’re interested in taking their health and well-being into their own hands. Learning about functional mushrooms and the healthy lifestyle that goes along with them can go a long way.”
The Berkshire Mushroom Festival offers a particularly enjoyable way to investigate these extraordinary organisms — and to consider whether fungi might even hold some answers to the human-made environmental challenges unfolding around us. As Stamets has put it, “I love a challenge and saving the Planet seems like a good one.” Come see what the fungi have to say for themselves.
The Berkshire Mushroom Festival takes place Aug. 22 and 23 at Dewey Hall, 91 Main St., Sheffield, Massachusetts. For more information and tickets, visit berkshiremushroom
.com
D.H. Callahan
Justin Schwarz and Laura Kleger, founders and directors of Friday Arts.
On Saturday, Aug. 22, Friday Arts will open its new gallery in the Bantam Arts Factory.
In the summer of 2025, former Guggenheim Museum head of digital Laura Kleger and her husband, award-winning filmmaker Justin Schwarz, opened a gallery … kind of. When we usually think of galleries, we might conjure the image of white walls lined with art and littered with sculptures. Some of us might think outside the box and visualize barns and industrial towers, like at the Wassaic Project, or Millerton’s Re Institute. But Friday Arts, as Schwarz and Kleger called it, thought of the space as secondary.
To them, the main idea is to display and promote art and the artists who make it. In that endeavor, they’ve done a whole lot in a single year, including hosting 11 exhibitions, collaborating with 15 artists and producing eight original films, all without a permanent home. They’ve done it at a series of venues, both traditional galleries and unconventional art spaces, including a former dairy factory in Amenia.
In addition to these pop-up galleries, they’ve also hosted art shows online. It’s part of an ethos developed around the concept of making art more accessible to everyday people. To that end, they started the Friday Arts Editions, which features limited runs of sculptures and prints designed for consumption. “We think buying art by living artists is a vote for a certain kind of world — one where creative expertise, imagination and possibility are valued.”
While they plan to continue all these efforts, they’re adding their own gallery space to the mix. And much like their diverse venues of the past, this one is a bit of a mix. Yes, it has white walls like a traditional gallery, but it’s housed in an old switch factory and surrounded by working artists. Moving into a building with a history seems appropriate, as part of their mission statement as an arts group is to foster deeper dialogues with the stories behind the works they present. Part of those efforts come through in interviews with the artists themselves and the subsequent short films posted to their website.
“We often envision a version of our younger selves,” Kleger said, “living outside of a major art center, spending time with [the website] as a helpful resource to inform their own creative journey.”
Their first show, opening on Saturday, Aug. 22 is called “Second Cutting,” based on the second harvest of the summer and “the finer, denser growth a field yields after the ground has already been worked and then returned to.” The show will feature paintings by Rachael Catharine Anderson, Ryan Steadman and Annika Tucksmith, which will work in dialogue with the theme. Kleger and Schwarz will personally lead tours of the exhibition on the two Saturdays after its opening and will offer subsequent tours by appointment.
More information, including videos and contact information for appointments, can be found at friday-arts.com.

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